Everybody Wants Some by Ian Christe Page A

pulled back while Roth ribbed the control room like a street-corner wiseguy running a friend through the dozens. “Hey man, that suit is you! You’ll get some leg tonight for sure!” “
    C’mon Dave, gimme a break,” Ted Templeman punched in from the control room, and a legendary ad-lib was born, a peek behind the curtain of the Wizard of Van Halen. As with most of the band’s off-the-cuff turns, however, each peck of brilliance was meticulously rehearsed. On the preproduction versions of “Unchained,” Roth delivered the “Gimme a break!” line himself.
    Eddie and Templeman often came to screaming fights about overdubs, with Templeman refusing to allow multitracking that the band could never re-create onstage. He nixed a version of “Unchained” where Eddie had split his guitar with a harmonizer so that the sound in the right speaker was a muddy octave lower. Some days they were best friends, sometimes Templeman was the enemy. Eddie later admitted to sneaking into the studio with engineer Donn Landee behind Templeman’s back. Significantly, Eddie’s need for more control pushed him to begin plans to build his own home studio with Landee’s help.
    Though brief instrumentals like “Eruption” were now part and parcel of a Van Halen package, Fair Warning ’s “Sunday Afternoon in the Park” was a complete departure. Composed quickly by Eddie on an Electro-Harmonix synthesizer, allegedly for his new wife, the funky two-minute track fit the album’s mood perfectly. The synth rock pulsed as hard as any rudimentary electro music, resembling squelching European synth devils like the Italian horror soundtrack group Goblin or England’s cold-blooded Gary Numan.
    Closing the record was “One Foot Out the Door,” a fast rocker built on another burbling synth line. The song was reputedly captured in one take as the band was literally heading out the door of Sunset Sound after finishing the record.
    After a reviewer in Rolling Stone predictably tore up the album, Valerie Bertinelli threw the band a congratulatory celebration. Regardless of what a magazine that had yet to put them on the cover thought, Fair Warning established the band artistically and proved Van Halen mattered beyond a party environment. At one point or another, all four members later declared it their favorite early Van Halen record and defended its virtues.
    Launched in April 1981, Fair Warning set a new chart high for the band by peaking at number 5 on the Billboard chart. The problem was there was no obvious radio hit. “Mean Street,” “Push Comes to Shove,” and “Unchained” all cracked the Top 30 rock list, but the mainstream pop hit that the record label wanted eluded them. In the eyes of the band’s business partners, that was a flaw. As much as the music industry pretended to be results-driven, there was a pack mentality that craved marketable hits.
    Roth liked to say that Van Halen had played Lima, Ohio, and Lima, Peru, Paris, Texas, and Paris, France, and every place in between. But except for rehearsal sessions in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a few subsequent gigs north of the border, the  Fair Warning  tour in 1981 never left the country. The band’s operation had become too massive, requiring a small city of support staff and hardware. The four weeks of tour rehearsal alone cost almost $100,000 in crew salaries plus stage and gear rental. The actual tour budget named expenses like $5,000 for an “ego ramp” reaching into the crowd, $1,000 for Alex’s fire effect, a whopping $4,000 for backstage passes, and $2,500 for dance lessons.
    Instead of burning audiences in the corneas with a straightforward light show, the  Fair Warning  stage setup brought the bad side of town to the suburbs. A bluesy urban street scene unfolded on a massive backdrop while Van Halen ripped through darker material like “Sin-ner’s Swing.” Meanwhile, Alex acquired a massive gong behind his kit, which he lit in a circle of flame and